We often encounter people talking about other people on social media. However, research on how people process such messages to form an impression toward the message writer on social media has been rare. This study investigated how a message recipient’s existing attitude toward a person (i.e., target) who is being described by another person (i.e., source) on social media affects the evaluation about the source from the perspective of spontaneous trait transference (Skowronski, Carlston, Mae, & Crawford, 1998). Research has shown that people tend to mistakenly associate a target’s trait with a source, although if the false association still exists when message recipients hold pre-existing attitudes toward targets has not been answered yet. To investigate the issue, the current study proposed two competing hypotheses. The first hypothesis predicted that more extreme pre-existing target attitudes would increase the salience of the target and thus would reduce the false association between the target and a source. The second hypothesis, drawing upon cognitive balance (Heider, 1958), predicted that people would evaluate a source in a manner in which they can maintain the cognitive consistency between their pre-existing target attitudes and newly formed source attitudes. Results from a 3 (initial attitude toward a target: positive vs. neutral vs. negative) x 3 (source’s description about a target: positive trait vs. negative traits vs. no trait) web-based experiment using the Twitter interface supported the prediction based on cognitive balance. The current study presents an important theoretical boundary condition for spontaneous trait transference on social media.
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